


Green Longing

by Silvereye



Category: Sunless Sea
Genre: Chocolate Box Treat, Dark, Emotional Manipulation, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-25 07:35:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17720894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvereye/pseuds/Silvereye
Summary: Sometimes the Fair King asks his prisoners: which is the most terrifying place in the Unterzee?





	Green Longing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [infernal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/infernal/gifts).



> This is a rather dark, unromantic take on Wrack and the Fair King. Please mind the tags.

Sometimes the Fair King asks his prisoners: which is the most terrifying place in the Unterzee? There are almost as many answers as there are prisoners. Mount Palmerston, where the devils lair. The Chapel of Lights, frigid and unsettling. Frostfound, the corridors of which are terror. The Isle of Cats, where they make red honey out of blood and memory. The Dawn Machine, a bright and sickening thing. Saviour's Rocks, brimming with sorrow-spiders. Kingeater's Castle.

A former zubmarine zailor names Rosegate and then ties her tongue in knots attempting to explain how it wasn't any particular detail, it was just... something. The Fair King does not understand, but he will concede there was something.

The Fair King has never left Wrack. The only way he will learn about these places is through his prisoners, his books and the visions. He still finds it faintly amusing none of his prisoners name Wrack, the city that has taken them. But perhaps they merely fear to say this to his face.

The Fair King has never left Wrack, but nothing ever leaves, or nearly nothing. His Zee-Captain does. All of them do. Most return for a few times, some even get snarled in tether, but eventually the zee takes them, or they marry someone soft and sweet in a dryland town the Fair King has never known, or someone whose loved ones were lost above Wrack kills them. It does not matter much. There will be new ones.

The current Zee-Captain is a slender young man, his hair the colour of zee around Wrack and his eyes full of the green longing. He's in love with the Fair King. He thinks they were lovers, sometime long ago. The Fair King knows the tether-dream his captain means. It is a very romantic story.

The captain has lured a thousand sailors to their deaths because the Fair King asked. He will lure another thousand, as long as the Fair King smile, and bites his lip, and takes the captain to his bed. The Fair King likes him, in a way, so this is no obligation.

One day, this captain, too will be lost to Fair King and Wrack. His memories will linger, and someone will see them in a tether dream in the future. (Perhaps someone already has seen them. The Fair King has dreamt of a person who had to have come through the Avid Horizon, down from High Wilderness.) Whenever it happens, in the visions the dreamer will find something that will remind them of the Fair King, or whoever comes after. Wrack eats people. The Fair King was not its first ruler. There will be a day where he will mistake a stranger for someone he has seen in a tether dream and that will be the beginning of his end.

None of the Fair King's prisoners say that Wrack is the most terrifying place in the Unterzee. But none of them have tasted tether like the Fair King has.


End file.
